Experience design

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Experience design (XD) is the practice of designing products, processes, services, events, omnichannel journeys, and environments with a focus placed on the quality of the user experience and culturally relevant solutions. [1] A meta discipline, experience design draws from many other disciplines including cognitive psychology and perceptual psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, architecture and environmental design, haptics, product design, strategic design, information design, information architecture, ethnography, marketing and brand strategy, strategic management and strategy consulting, interaction design, service design, storytelling, agile, lean startup, technical communication, and design thinking.[ citation needed ]

Design can have different connotations in different fields of application, but there are two basic meanings of design: as a verb and as a noun.

A business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment which in a specific sequence produce a service or product for a particular customer or customers. Business processes occur at all organizational levels and may or may not be visible to the customers. A business process may often be visualized (modeled) as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a process matrix of a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process. The benefits of using business processes include improved customer satisfaction and improved agility for reacting to rapid market change. Process-oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos.

User experience (UX) refers to a person's emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human–computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency. User experience may be considered subjective in nature to the degree that it is about individual perception and thought with respect to the system. User experience is dynamic as it is constantly modified over time due to changing usage circumstances and changes to individual systems as well as the wider usage context in which they can be found. In the end, user experience is about how the user interacts with and experiences the product.

Contents

Commercial context

In its commercial context, experience design is driven by consideration of the moments of engagement, or touchpoints, between people and brands, and the ideas, emotions, and memories that these moments create. Commercial experience design is also known as customer experience design. In the domain of marketing, it may be associated with experiential marketing. Experience designers are often employed to identify existing touchpoints and create new ones, and then to score the arrangement of these touchpoints so that they produce the desired outcome.

A touchpoint can be defined as any way a consumer can interact with a business, whether it be person-to-person, through a website, an app or any form of communication. When consumers come in contact with these touchpoints it gives them the opportunity to compare their prior perceptions of the business and form an opinion.

Idea mental image or concept

In philosophy, ideas are usually taken as mental representational images of some object. Ideas can also be abstract concepts that do not present as mental images. Many philosophers have considered ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of being. The capacity to create and understand the meaning of ideas is considered to be an essential and defining feature of human beings. In a popular sense, an idea arises in a reflexive, spontaneous manner, even without thinking or serious reflection, for example, when we talk about the idea of a person or a place. A new or original idea can often lead to innovation.

In commerce, customer experience (CX) is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the environments the customer experiences during their experience. A good customer experience means that the individual's experience during all points of contact matches the individual's expectations. Gartner asserts the importance of managing the customer's experience.

Broader context

In the broader environmental context, there is far less formal attention given to the design of the experienced environment, physical and virtual—but though it's unnoticed, experience design is taking place. Ronald Jones, describes the practice as working across disciplines, often furthest from their own creating a relevant integration between concepts, methods and theories. Experience designers design experiences over time with real and measurable consequences; time is their medium. According to Jones, the mission of Experience Design is "to persuade, stimulate, inform, envision, entertain, and forecast events, influencing meaning and modifying human behavior." [2]

Ronald Jones is an artist, critic and educator who gained prominence in New York City during the mid-1980s. In the magazine Contemporary, Brandon Labelle wrote: "Working as an artist, writer, curator, professor, lecturer and critic over the last 20 years, Jones is a self-styled Conceptualist, spanning the worlds of academia and art, opera and garden design, and acting as paternal spearhead of contemporary critical practice. Explorative and provocative, Jones creates work that demands attention that is both perceptual and political." Labelle positions Jones along the leading edge of a "contemporary critical practice" that is perhaps best described as interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary.

Within companies, experience design can refer not just to the experience of customers, but to that of employees as well. Anyone who is exposed to the space either physically, digitally, or second hand (web, media, family member, friend) may be considered in the application of XD. This includes staff, vendors, patients, visiting professionals, families, media professionals and contractors.

Focus debated

There is a debate occurring in the experience design community regarding its focus, provoked in part by design scholar and practitioner, Don Norman. Norman claims that when designers describe people only as customers, consumers, and users, designers risk diminishing their ability to do good design. [3] Given that experience is so totally an affective, subjective, and personal process—not an abstraction—it would be ironic, it's been argued, for experience designers, when designing experiences, to approach people merely as objects of commerce or cogs in a machine. Experience design, perhaps more than other forms of design, is transactive and transformative: every experience designer is an experiencer; and every experiencer, via his or her reactions, a designer of experience in turn. While commercial contexts often describe people as "customers, consumers, or users", this and non-commercial contexts might use the words "audience, people, and participants". In either case, for conscientious experience designers, this is merely a semantic difference.

Don Norman American academic

Donald Arthur Norman is a researcher, professor, and author. Norman is the director of The Design Lab at University of California, San Diego. He is best known for his books on design, especially The Design of Everyday Things. He is widely regarded for his expertise in the fields of design, usability engineering, and cognitive science. He is a co-founder and consultant with the Nielsen Norman Group. He is also an IDEO fellow and a member of the Board of Trustees of IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. He also holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. Norman is an active Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), where he spends two months a year teaching.

Inclusive experience

A great design experience must be self-explanatory and emphasizes on a user journey from step to step in minimalistic manner. In a broader term, it is a branch of inclusive design and universal design. The purpose of inclusion in the context of experience architecture is to create technology and user interfaces accessible for wider audiences inclusive of full range of human diversity with respect to ability, gender, age and other forms of human difference.

A user journey is, colloquially in the UK and parts of the US, the experiences a person has when utilizing/interacting with something. This idea is generally found in user experience circles around web design and how users interact with software experiences. It is often used as a shorthand for the overall user experience and set of actions that one can take in a software/virtual experience.

Universal design is the design of buildings, products or environments to make them accessible to all people, regardless of age, disability or other factors.

Experience architecture (XA) is the art of articulating a clear user story/journey through an information architecture, interaction design and experience design that an end user navigates across products and services offered by the client or as intended by the designer. This visual representation is intended not only to highlight the systems that the end user will touch and interact with, but also the key interactions that the user will have with interacting the internal systems or back end structure of an application. It provides a holistic view of the experience, vertical knowledge of industry, the systems, documenting, analysing and the points that should be focused on when developing a series of interactions that are intended to enhance end user’s emotions. The Experience architecture provides an overall direction for user experience actions across the projects.

This methodology is to achieve independent experience and accessibility for users who are aging, abled or disabled or impaired either by birth, natural or incurred through natural events. It requires exercising and creating interfaces or prototyping a lo-fidelity design for the physical world that makes actions and steps more self-explanatory, thereby removing layers of prerequisite requirements to access any digital system. Inclusive experience is an emerging and developing skill sets and standard elements in applications that are mass-produced for consumers, government and in other public domains.

Multiple dimensions

Experience design is not driven by a single design discipline. Instead, it requires a cross-discipline perspective that considers multiple aspects of the brand/business/environment/experience from product, packaging and retail environment to the clothing and attitude of employees. Experience design seeks to develop the experience of a product, service, or event along any or all of the following dimensions: [4]

While it is unnecessary (or even inappropriate) for all experiences to be developed highly across all of these dimensions, the more in-depth and consistently a product or service is developed across them—the more responsive an offering is to a group's or individual's needs and desires (e.g., a customer) it is likely to be. Enhancing the affordance of a product or service, its interface with people, is key to commercial experience design.

See also

Related Research Articles

Systems design is the process of defining the architecture, modules, interfaces, and data for a system to satisfy specified requirements. Systems design could be seen as the application of systems theory to product development. There is some overlap with the disciplines of systems analysis, systems architecture and systems engineering.

Corporate branding refers to the practice of promoting the brand name of a corporate entity, as opposed to specific products or services. The activities and thinking that go into corporate branding are different from product and service branding because the scope of a corporate brand is typically much broader. It should also be noted that while corporate branding is a distinct activity from product or service branding, these different forms of branding can, and often do, take place side-by-side within a given corporation. The ways in which corporate brands and other brands interact is known as the corporate brand architecture.

Usability the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object such as a tool or device; the degree to which a software can be used by consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use

Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object such as a tool or device. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use.

Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." Beyond the digital aspect, interaction design is also useful when creating physical (non-digital) products, exploring how a user might interact with it. Common topics of interaction design include design, human–computer interaction, and software development. While interaction design has an interest in form, its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what characterizes IxD as a design field as opposed to a science or engineering field.

Service design is the activity of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication and material components of a service in order to improve its quality and the interaction between the service provider and its customers. Service design may function as a way to inform changes to an existing service or create a new service entirely.

Servicescape physical environment in which a service process takes place

Servicescape is a model developed by Booms and Bitner to emphasize thee impact of the physical environment in which a service process takes place. The aim of the servicescapes model is to explain behavior of people within the service environment with a view to designing environments that does not accomplish organisational goals in terms of achieving desired behavioural responses. For consumers visiting a service or retail store, the service environment is the first aspect of the service that is perceived by the customer and it is at this stage that consumers are likely to form impressions of the level of service they will receive.

A persona, in user-centered design and marketing is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. Marketers may use personas together with market segmentation, where the qualitative personas are constructed to be representative of specific segments. The term persona is used widely in online and technology applications as well as in advertising, where other terms such as pen portraits may also be used.

Mockup scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes

In manufacturing and design, a mockup, or mock-up, is a scale or full-size model of a design or device, used for teaching, demonstration, design evaluation, promotion, and other purposes. A mockup is a prototype if it provides at least part of the functionality of a system and enables testing of a design. Mock-ups are used by designers mainly to acquire feedback from users. Mock-ups address the idea captured in a popular engineering one-liner: You can fix it now on the drafting board with an eraser or you can fix it later on the construction site with a sledge hammer.

User experience design is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction with the product. User experience design encompasses traditional human–computer interaction (HCI) design, and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users.

Brand engagement is the process of forming an emotional or rational attachment between a consumer and a brand. It comprises one aspect of brand management.

Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.

Brand identifies a good or service

A brand is an overall experience of a customer that distinguishes an organization or product from its rivals in the eyes of the customer. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising. Name brands are sometimes distinguished from generic or store brands.

Experiential interior design (EID) is the practice of employing experiential values in interior experience design. EID is a new design approach to interior architecture based on modern environmental psychology emphasizing human experiential needs. The notion of EID is initiated from the subjective impact of a designed environment on experience formation. This environmental experience is defined as the result of human and environment interactions providing intellectual or emotional acquisition. The main application of EID is to create engaging environmental experiences.

User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies. This field of research aims at improving the usability of products by incorporating experimental and observational research methods to guide the design, development, and refinement of a product. User researchers often work alongside designers, engineers, and programmers in all stages of product creation and idealization.

Employee experience design is the application of experience design in order to intentionally design HR products, services, events, and organisational environments with a focus on the quality of the employee experience whilst providing relevant solutions for an organisation.

References

  1. ↑ Aarts, Emile H. L.; Stefano Marzano (2003). The New Everyday: Views on Ambient Intelligence. 010 Publishers. p. 46. ISBN   978-90-6450-502-7.
  2. ↑ "Ronald Jones". Konstfack Vårutställning 2008. Retrieved 2008-10-03.[ permanent dead link ]
  3. ↑ "Words Matter. Talk About People: Not Customers, Not Consumers, Not Users". Don Norman's jnd website. Retrieved 2008-10-03.
  4. ↑ Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, Darrel Rhea (2005): Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences. New Riders Press ISBN   0-321-37409-6
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